Another in my occasional series of "Flashbacks" looking back at blog entries made before this Weebly version started.

The final destination on my tour of remote countryside schools was LongJie (Dragon Street) Middle School. It’s very poor. The photo shows a typical dormitory - 12 students living in a room the size of my kitchen. As usual, the day started with 2-3 hours in the car, then observing 2 lessons and giving feedback. After lunch, I gave 2 model lessons and an hour’s training. Then supper and 2-3 hours onward journey.

The observed lessons today couldn’t have been more different. The first was a new teacher, with the English name “Shrimp” (!?). She was teaching a Grade 1 class - students who had been learning English for just a week. Shrimp’s English is excellent and she kept it simple and clear. The students eagerly volunteered to come to the front to recite simple greeting dialogues and copied down new letters of the alphabet into their notebooks. The second lesson was from a more experienced teacher called “Ryan”. 90% of it was conducted in Chinese, and it involved the teacher, and later the students, drawing various things on the board and on paper. I was trying to work out the point of it all (with my limited Chinese) right until the bell finally rang and the lesson was over. The other teachers observing the class with me also left very confused. One asked me, “Was that an Art lesson or an English lesson?”. I managed to catch Ryan alone later, but when I asked him about the lesson he suddenly started crying! Once composed, he told me he had planned a lesson from the textbook, but changed his mind at the last minute and decided to try an idea he had read in a newspaper!? The other English teachers had apparently criticised him after the lesson and he now wanted to apologise to me! I ditched my planned feedback about “Teaching Aims” and “Lesson Plans” and tried to encourage him instead. I commended his willingness to try new teaching ideas(!), his bravery in letting others watch the experiment(!!) and assured him that for every failed idea there’s a successful one (right??).

My own self-esteem took a battering between afternoon lessons. I had a bit of a wobbly tummy and had to rush to the school toilet. Staff and students share the same block - a series of holes in the ground with no partitions, let alone cubicles! Now, the sight of a foreigner in your school is enough for stares in itself, but a squatting foreigner trying to keep his balance amidst the filth is simply too much to miss, and I managed to attract a crowd of 10-15 gawking boys as I did my business! I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me …until I remembered what lay beneath!

I'm pretty hopeless at remembering names, but I can usually spot a familiar face. No such luck last week, though, when I was approached outside my school by a young lady with a cheery, "Hello Paul. Remember me?". Slightly embarrassed I had to confess I didn't. "I'm your old friend Josie, from Guiyang", she explained. I wish I could say there was a sudden burst of memories, but it was only the name that sounded vaguely familiar. Thoughtfully, Josie had brought along some photos of me from that time and a couple of letters I had written to her, too! We've had no contact since then, so it was shock, but a lovely surprise, to meet an old friend. Unfortunately, she caught me right at the moment I was due to take my Lattitude volunteers to lunch, so I had no time right then to stop and reminisce.

However, yesterday we met for lunch and I was able to pore over her old photos and find memories of my time in Duyun, some 16 years ago, slowly creeping back! I was working for V.S.O. at that time, and Josie had just graduated from the Teachers' College as I began my teaching placement there. I met her socially amongst other friends a dozen times. In my defence, she did look a lot different in those days! The one photo that did ring bells though was me standing in front of a Mao Zedong wardrobe [below], which I spotted in her grandma's house, I think, when I visited.

Josie is now living in Kunming, and married with a 5 year old son. She heard I live here too through a mutual friend and tracked me down to Robert's School on the internet. Unbeknown to me, she'd been waiting for me outside the school for over an hour, poor thing. I'm jolly glad she persevered though.

With the return of our nanny after her week's holiday, Jiajia and I decided to get away for a few days before starting work once again. A newly opened line of track now links Kunming to Mengzi - a town where I lived and worked for a year with V.S.O. back in 1996. So, we took the early train this morning for a busy but fairly pleasant four hour journey through towns, countryside and tunnels. The train terminates at a station some 14km from the actual town (the line is due to be completed by the end of the year) and is, rather bizarrely, situated atop a hill, so you have to climb down 200 steps to get to the road where buses/taxis will complete the journey for you

Mengzi itself has seen huge expansion since I lived there. A vast new development to the west has increased the size of the town fourfold. It's not a town anymore - it's a city. I used to take a horse and cart from the College where I worked to the main shopping street. Now there are flashy public buses connecting you to shopping malls and enormous government buildings. On arrival we found a great hotel; clean, quiet, friendly and only 220RMB (£22) a night, including breakfast. Ten minutes walk from the lake and the old town. We'll explore them tomorrow.

After a busy day yesterday with the volunteers I finally got home at 10pm and did a quick online scan of the day's news. It revealed there had been a sizeable (5.6) earthquake in Yunnan at around noon. Having felt nothing in Kunming, I shot off a quick email to Lattitude Australia to tell them they could reassure any worried parents there that all was well. It was only then that I investigated further to find out where exactly it was. And it turns out it was 13km from the town where I used to work as a volunteer with VSO, JiaoKui. The BBC video showing the afternath even shows my old Middle School [white, left in the photo above] and students milling around in the playground. About 80 people are thought to have died so far but, after some quick texting, thankfully none of the friends I still keep in touch with there.

An ex-VSO friend of mine, Michael, kindly arranged for his daughter Ruth to show us around her fashion design studio in London today - of particular interest to Jiajia who has a background in design and would like to add her own clothes creations to the brands that she sells in her store. It was a hive of activity, full of inspiration and ideas for Jiajia to pursue when back in Kunming. We planned to visit the British Museum afterwards but the rain and a rather punishing sightseeing schedule this week saw us heading home instead.

I had the great pleasure yesterday of meeting up with an old student of mine today. Ruth [centre] was one of the English teachers I used to train when I lived in JiangCheng three years ago. I almost didn't recognise her, as she has changed her glasses and was missing her two front teeth from a recent fall, poor girl! To Ruth's right is "Ian", one of her ex-students and her nephew, who was in Kunming to enter an English speaking competition (he came 18th out of over 100 entrants). To her left is her elder sister - one of seven sisters in her family (no brothers!). We had a nice meal together and reminisced about JiangCheng.

Today I was invited to lunch by Li Guo Zhi, my old boss from VSO, who is down from Beijing for a meeting. There were also some new and leaving VSO volunteers there, and I enjoyed chatting to them and sharing some local knowledge about Kunming and Yunnan. It's really nice how VSO have kept in touch, despite it being over 2 years since I left the organisation.

About the author

Paul Hider lives and works in Kunming (SW China) and updates his blog about his life there every other day.